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The Humanities in a Utilitarian Age

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The Humanities in a Utilitarian Age Humanities 2014, 3, 73–87; doi:10.3390/h3010073 OPEN ACCESS humanities ISSN 2076-0787 www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities Article “Imagining What We Know”: The Humanities in a Utilitarian Age Paul Keen Department of English, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON K1S 2Z8, Canada; E-Mail: [email protected]; Tel.: +6-135-202-600 (ext. 2333) Received: 5 January 2014; in revised form: 24 February 2014 / Accepted: 25 February 2014 / Published: 5 March 2014 Abstract: This paper explores the ways that critics writing in the early nineteenth century developed arguments in favor of what we think of today as the humanities in the face of utilitarian pressures that dismissed the arts as self-indulgent pursuits incapable of addressing real-world problems. Its focus reflects the extent to which the financial crisis in our own day has manifested itself in a jarring shift in research priorities towards applied knowledge: a retrenchment which has foregrounded all over again the question of how to make the case for the value of the humanities. These problems, however, also constitute an important opportunity: a chance to re-imagine our answers to questions about the nature and role of the humanities, their potential benefits to contemporary life, and how we might channel these benefits back into the larger society. The good news is that in many ways, this self-reflexive challenge is precisely what the humanities have always done best: highlight the nature and the force of the narratives that have helped to define how we understand our society—its various pasts and its possible futures—and to suggest the larger contexts within which these issues must ultimately be situated. History repeats itself, but never in quite the same way: knowing more about past debates will provide a crucial basis for moving forward as we position themselves to respond to new social, economic, technological, and cultural challenges during an age of radical change. Keywords: humanities; crisis; historical context; early nineteenth century; utilitarianism; Percy Shelley; public value Humanities 2014, 3 74 1. The Present Crisis For those of us working in the humanities it is, as Charles Dickens famously said, the best of times and the worst of times. The digital revolution has manifested itself in a range of cultural changes that are in many ways far more radical than the ones unleashed by the invention of the printing press over five hundred years ago, and they have made their presence felt far more swiftly. Where those earlier changes took centuries before their impact was fully realized, the digital revolution has redefined our communicative world in decades. And whereas the invention of moveable type preserved the basic form of the codex, the digital revolution has altered the most fundamental ways that it is possible to think about the materiality of writing, and about the relation between books and texts. Its interactive possibilities have also forced us to reimagine our ideas about the relationship between authors and readers, and between the individual reader and the reading public (or publics) to which he or she may feel they belong. Never before has a generation lived through such extraordinary technological and cultural changes. Nor are these changes limited to those emerging creative and critical forms that have become known as digital humanities. The advent of new technologies and the new forms of textual community they enable have cast those earlier technologies of writing associated with manuscript and print culture in an exciting new light by helping to expose many of the assumptions that had, until the last couple of decades, been so thoroughly naturalized that they resisted critical analysis. As critics such as Adrien Johns and Andrew Piper have argued, becoming more attuned to the historical arbitrariness of these technological achievements (the fact that their history did not unfold in any preordained way) has made us newly aware of the kinds of ideological work that were required in order not to think about the many forms of mediation (cultural, political, technological, educational, economic) that had naturalized these earlier forms of textual production [1,2]. As a result of these changes in our own day, we have very rapidly grown used to thinking in far broader terms about the kinds of infrastructure that lurk just beneath the surface of the production, circulation, and reception of the books whose material reality earlier critics tended to dismiss in order to concentrate on the literary richness of the ideas they contained. Predictions of “the death of the book” (a media favorite for the past several years, though it seems to have diminished recently) may have been premature, but we can never take the idea of “the book” for granted again. That is the upside. But if the extraordinarily rapid and wide-ranging changes unleashed by the digital revolution have shaken up our most entrenched assumptions about important forms of cultural production and reception in critically exciting ways, it is equally true that it is hard to think of a time when the humanities were so badly besieged on any number of levels, the most serious of which has been a jarring shift in research priorities towards market-driven applied knowledge: a retrenchment that has foregrounded all over again the question of how to make the case for the value of the humanities. As Martha Nussbaum has recently argued, “we are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance”: not “the global economic crisis that began in 2008” (though that context is definitely part of the issue), but the widespread erosion of support for the humanities in terms of both pedagogical and research priorities within universities ([3], pp. 1–2). Nussbaum’s book—Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities—has become a widely cited element of this debate, but the urgency of the topic has generated numerous books and articles, many of them by distinguished Humanities 2014, 3 75 scholars in a range of venues, from academic journals to leading magazines and newspapers. As Marjorie Perloff put it in an article entitled “Crisis in the Humanities”, “[o]ne of our most common genres today is the epitaph for the humanities” [4]. The phrase itself—crisis in the humanities—has become so familiar that it has begun to appear in scare quotes, along with warnings that just because everyone is saying it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. “You’ve probably heard several times already that the humanities are in ‘crisis’”, Gordon Hunter and Feisal G. Mohammed wrote in a New Republic article entitled “The Real Humanities Crisis Is Happening at Public Universities”, but as their title implies, this doesn’t mean that we should doubt it. “The crisis is real”, they assure us [5]. Few would contradict them. In a column in the New York Times that was prompted by the threat of SUNY Albany to close their French, Italian, Classics, Russian and theater programs, Stanley Fish responded to a letter from one of his readers that it “will be a sad, sad day if and when we allow the humanities to collapse” by insisting “that it had already happened”. Fish’s tone of world-weary resignation struck many people as misguided (“I have always had trouble believing in the high-minded case for a core curriculum—that it preserves and transmits the best that has been thought and said—but I believe fully in the core curriculum as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists”), but his pessimism is widely shared [6]. Robert Weisbuch is on safe ground in his insistence that “today’s consensus about the state of the humanities—it’s bad, it’s getting worse, and no one is doing much about it—is supported by dismal facts” ([7], p. B4). However illustrious their past, the humanities have no future at all, so these epitaphs suggest, and that recognition has put its stamp on our present discussions like few other topics today, the digital revolution not excepted. The signs of this crisis are everywhere around us. In England, the government’s 2010 decision to cancel funding for the teaching of humanities programs has been doubled by the spirit of intellectual recoil that characterizes its new Research Excellence Framework, which was recently established as the official basis for determining research funding allocations amongst English universities. As Stefan Collini has pointed out, part of this formula for funding allocation depends on what the Research Excellence Framework calls the “impact” of research, a somewhat nebulous concept which the Framework breaks down into thirty-seven categories, each of which is in turn measured by a series of “indicators” such as (to quote the Framework) “creating new businesses”, “commercializing new products or processes”, and “attracting R & D investment from global business” (quoted in [8], p. 18). As Collini points out, the final category, the only one where the work of most humanities scholars might easily be slotted, which is headed “other quality of life benefits”, is unique amongst the thirty-seven in having no examples provided. In place of the sorts of concrete indicators suggested in the other thirty-six examples of research impact, this final one contains a one-line note that merely says: “please suggest what might also be included in this list” (quoted in [8], p. 18). Admittedly, the “impact” score accounts for only 20% of the overall assessment (likely to rise to 25% in the next REF cycle); publications in scholarly journals of “high quality” still weigh far more heavily. But this inability to imagine the “impact” or usefulness of the humanities is a chilling index of a broader failure of the same kind.
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